In the past year I have been on three ABW walks where leaving faeces behind was not the right thing to do. However, if it wasn’t for Snow Week, the thought would not have even crossed my mind. Yet, despite the unpleasant subject, it’s becoming something that more of us need to consider.

Why? There are probably three environments where it is best to follow ‘Leave No Trace’ principles:

1. where the breakdown of urine and faeces is too slow
2. where the volume of hikers is too great to avoid damage to the environment
3. to be able to use campsites designed for “self-contained” (i.e. RV) campers

In the case of Snow Week it was the obvious choice; to bury faeces in snow would only mean they would thaw out in spring, sit on the surface and contaminate waterways. But it’s not just frozen environments that suffer. I’ve previously mentioned how the greatest disappointment from the Larapinta Trail was the environmental damage caused by shallow toilets scattered literally everywhere near the trail. The arid, rocky environment means that toilet paper does not break down, holes are shallow or non-existent, and urine does not wash away. Then there was Southwest Tasmania, where the fragile landscape above the tree line would have been best left undisturbed.

In the latter two cases, it would have been very easy to carry faeces to the next official campsite where toilets were provided. Closer to home, anyone who’s walked the Flinders Ranges knows how foul it gets around those campsites where there is no toilet. Yanyanna Hut and Buckaringa North are just two bad examples.

So what to do? It’s a daunting proposition when you first confront it, but having now done it, I can tell you it’s no big deal. I’ve even made mistakes just so you don’t have to!

Urine Collection

Thankfully, there aren’t too many times when we will need to carry out our urine. The main reason to collect it will be to minimise going out into extreme environments such as a blizzard. For men, this is a simple process. For women, I am no expert but I understand that the ‘Shewee’ is the popular choice.

Most of the time, environmental impacts from urine are minimal. But please boys, don’t go close to your campsite and not on the foliage. Plenty of good tent spots on the Larapinta were ruined this way.

Obviously the main concern is faeces: how to collect and store them efficiently without making a terrible mess. This requires three steps…

Collecting Faeces

There are two ways to do this: poop directly into a bag,, or onto something that can be neatly packaged.

The first way is the hardest, and probably could be practiced beforehand in the shower(!), but apparently it’s easy to learn. Certainly it’s likely to be the neatest. Probably the best bags for this are the green waste bags we get supplied by our local council, as doggy doo bags are a little small. You can also buy specifically made bags that even contain thickening and anti-odour agents.

The second way was what I tried, but my mistake was not having something down first. It meant I ended up packing out a lot of unnecessary snow. Next time I’ll use the same green waste bags, but split them along a seam so that they lie flat, then weight each corner down with a small pebble or snowball. Then it’s just a matter of picking them up by the corners, tying and dropping them into another bag.

This is much easier than it sounds. In fact, the bowel cancer screening tests sent to over-50s are basically the same, except that you put the flushable sheet inside the toilet. If I’d known it was so easy I wouldn’t have put it off for so long.

Storing & Transporting Faeces

My second mistake with Snow Week was obsessing too much about storage when it wasn’t the real problem. Duh! Of course, it was all going to freeze solid anyway. So much so that my original plan of carrying an old protein powder container turned out to be over-kill. Once they went in there, they weren’t coming out again!

You see, I got my information from forums for multi day rock climbs. For them, whatever is dangling below doesn’t really matter. However for us, carrying a bulky and inflexible container was a real nuisance, and it ended up needing to be thrown away.

Far better is to use a dry bag. With double-wrapped poo, and then the dry bag, it’s very unlikely that the smell will get out, and you can hang it easily on the outside of your pack. That prevents the worst of all possible fears: escape! I would also bring one of those fancy plastic bags that’s supposed to prevent odours getting through if if I’m out for more than a few days.

Disposal

My personal view is that only the green waste bags decompose fast enough to be able to go directly into the drop toilets. However, even this is controversial, and must respond to what the local authorities want as well. For example, in Kosci NP they specifically ask you not to do this. I would also be very careful about any other plastic bags that claim to be biodegradable as these could take years and block whatever is being used to clean out the toilets. Bad karma!

The best way to know if your plastic bags will be appropriate is to test them: fill them with something similar and store them them for a few days. They should have disintegrated by then. Our green waste bags barely last 3 days, hence the extra layer on longer trips!

Safer is to carry it all out and bin it when you get home. Of course, that’s as long as your local waste company doesn’t mind.